Friendship request throws error

[Kristina Hoeppner]

on latest 1.8.0dev:

When I request friendship with another user, I get the following warning:

[WAR] c1 (user/requestfriendship.php:105) Creating default object from empty value
Call stack (most recent first):

    log_message("Creating default object from empty value", 8, true, true, "/home/kristina/code/mahara/htdocs/user/requestfrie...", 105) at /home/kristina/code/mahara/htdocs/lib/errors.php:446
    error(2, "Creating default object from empty value", "/home/kristina/code/mahara/htdocs/user/requestfrie...", 105, array(size 12)) at /home/kristina/code/mahara/htdocs/user/requestfriendship.php:105
    requestfriendship_submit(object(Pieform), array(size 3)) at Unknown:0
    call_user_func_array("requestfriendship_submit", array(size 2)) at /home/kristina/code/mahara/htdocs/lib/pieforms/pieform.php:528
    Pieform->__construct(array(size 3)) at /home/kristina/code/mahara/htdocs/lib/pieforms/pieform.php:170
    Pieform::process(array(size 3)) at /home/kristina/code/mahara/htdocs/lib/pieforms/pieform.php:71
    pieform(array(size 3)) at /home/kristina/code/mahara/htdocs/user/requestfriendship.php:80

[Robert Lyon (robertl-9)]

I'm unable to replicate this error from either user/find.php page or the link on user/view.php page eg user/view.php?id=5

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

I still got it on a clean new 1.8.0dev.

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

Are you using PHP 5.4, Kristina? That particular error is an E_STRICT notice.

We set Mahara to print messages that match E_ALL, which despite the word "ALL" is actually a combination of all errors *except* E_STRICT. But, in 5.4 they changed it so that it includes E_STRICT.

So perhaps you're seeing this message, while RobertL and I aren't, because you're using PHP 5.4.

Putting a debugging breakpoint in the Mahara error() function, I can see that there are actually LOTS of E_STRICT notices that we're currently ignoring. Perhaps what we should do is change the developermode/productionmode setting so that it specifically prints E_ALL & E_STRICT, which would give consistent output in 5.3 and 5.4. (Or conversely, specifically set it to E_ALL & ~E_STRICT in order to continue ignoring E_STRICT messages.)

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

Hm... actually, if it's an E_STRICT error, what prevents it from being displayed in Mahara is *not* our error_reporting setting. It's that in $error_lookup we haven't mapped them to one of the Mahara error/warning types.

So it's pretty strange you're seeing that message, Kristina. Perhaps it changed error classes at some point...

Well, in any case there are a lot of E_STRICT notices it would be good to clean up in Mahara. But I don't think we want to start showing E_STRICT's to people who have just set productionmode to false, because there are about 30 of them that show up on each page load, due to the fact that we have a lot of abstract static functions in the codebase, and those now throw an E_STRICT notice. We should limit it to people who have turned on developermode, I think, and we should fix those every-page E_STRICT's.

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

Indeed, I've got PHP 5.4.

[Robert Lyon (robertl-9)]

I've added a patch for this:
https://reviews.mahara.org/#/c/2504/

From what I've read we just need to declare the stdClass before trying to assign things to it.

[Mahara Bot (dev-mahara)]

Reviewed: https://reviews.mahara.org/2504
Committed: http://gitorious.org/mahara/mahara/commit/29afdf8ad017ff2cec4fd936c059722dc542e812
Submitter: Aaron Wells (<email address hidden>)
Branch: master

commit 29afdf8ad017ff2cec4fd936c059722dc542e812
Author: Robert Lyon <email address hidden>
Date: Wed Sep 18 07:34:22 2013 +1200

Friendship request throws error (bug 1222350)

- throwing 'Creating default object from empty value' error
- need to declare stdClass first

Change-Id: Ia736475e49c88e9a74bfc1480def370cb65440f5
Signed-off-by: Robert Lyon <email address hidden>